Month: February 2016

Do you keep your Exchange 2013 Hybrid server on the latest CU? If you don’t; read this article. If you do; read it anyway because you may still be affected! Microsoft recommend that you keep up to date with Exchange CUs if you are running in a Hybrid Office 365 environment, and this is a classic example of why that is the case.

On April 15th 2016, Microsoft will be replacing the Office 365 TLS certificate and the new certificate with have a different Issuer and Subject. This means that if the following scenarios are true, you may face partial loss of mail flow on April 15th if you don’t take remedial action:

You’ve upgraded the Exchange 2013 servers that handle hybrid mailflow to Exchange 2013 CU9 or higher. However, since upgrading to CU9, you HAVE NOT re-run the Hybrid Configuration wizard (either from the Exchange Admin Center or via the direct download link).

The remedial action is as follows:

If the Exchange 2013 servers handling hybrid mailflow are running Exchange 2013 CU8 or lower, follow the instructions in Updates for Exchange 2013 to install the latest cumulative update on at least one server.

After you install the latest cumulative update, download the new HCW application and run the wizard following the instructions here .

There is also a manual update option for those who do not want to run the HCW again (maybe due to extensive customisation).

I came across an odd situation recently whereby my AADConnect installation had decided to communicate with a Domain Controller which was in another site, across an Active Directory replication link with a 180 minute replication interval. This was no good for my customer as they made their AD changes on the site local to AADConnect, so I decided to remedy this by forcing AADConnect to communicate with a particular DC. This can be useful for many reasons, and you can actually set a list of ‘preferred Domain Controllers’ to allow for fault tolerance.

To do this, go into the Synchronisation Service, head on over to the Connectors tab and find your Active Directory Domain Services Connector. The below example is synchronising multiple AD Forests. Once you’ve selected your domain, you can see which Domain Controller is currently in use by checking the ‘Connection Status’ area (shown in the central area of the below screenshot).

To change the Domain Controller in use, go to the Properties tab for your domain (on the right hand ‘Actions’ pane). Go into the ‘Configure Directory Partitions’ tab and you will see a handy tick box entitled ‘Only use preferred domain controllers’.

Place a checkmark in this box, and a window will appear, allowing you to enter your shortlist of Domain Controllers.

Once you’ve entered your preferred DCs, OK your way out of these windows and hey presto, you are done! It’s a nice and easy task to perform, but not one I’ve seen documented online before.

Here’s a small Friday afternoon snippet of useful information for all you Office 365/Identity nerds out there.

If you have converted an AAD user from ‘Synced with Active Directory’ to ‘In Cloud’ and you want to sync a new user object with that user, you will need to clear the ImmutableID and then match it up with the new user object. I’m planning on creating a more extensive post on that very subject in the near future, but for now, I’ll give you this titbit of information:

You might think that those quote marks are a bit pointless, but you would be wrong! If you were to run the command as shown below, without the “” marks, it wouldn’t show you an error, but it also wouldn’t actually clear the ImmutableID.